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This is highly dependent on screen size and viewing distance.
On a computer screen or a phone screen? No, it's not really noticeable. Hell, on some phone screen sizes/distances, you might not even be able to tell 720p vs 1080p.
On a 120"+ projector screen? Yes, it is definitely noticeable.
I have a small home theater and picked up a refurbished 4K LED projector (Epson 3200) coming from an old 1080DLP (Viewsonic 8200) - massive difference!
I had a 6" 720p phone. Couldn't tell the resolution, but could definitely tell the longer battery life
Yep, on phones and other mobile devices, lower resolutions help significantly with battery life and framerates. Tiny super high resolution displays are pretty much pointless unless you're using a VR headset (then the resolution matters more).
My desktop monitor is a 54" 4K TV that I sit about 3' from. It's somewhat difficult for me to pick out individual pixels even when I lean in. My living room TV is 70" 4K, but I sit 15' away from it. There's no way I could tell the difference in 4K and 1080 from pixel density alone. I can however tell the difference between 4K and 1080 streams because of how shitty low bitrates look. 4K streams crush all of the dark colors and leave you with these nasty banding effects that I don't see as often on lower resolution streams.
4K streams crush all of the dark colors and leave you with these nasty banding effects that I don’t see as often on lower resolution streams.
Reason #123798 why I watch archived copies of blu-rays (that were legally purchased completely legally) via Jellyfin/Plex.
No such thing when you're watching live events, and I (and apparently most everyone else) can't tell the difference between 4K and 1080 at a reasonable distance anyway.
I can barely tell the difference between 720p and 1080p. I will probably never buy another TV.
Maybe I need glasses?
I do wear glasses and I came here to post exactly your first sentence. There probably is a difference, sure, but I personally can't see it unless I put both files next to each other and really try to see it.
I've been digitising our movie collection so I played around with resolutions to minimise the storage space needed - I did settle on doing everything in 1080p but mostly because it feels weird to use a resolution the internet tells me is bad and I'm vulnerable to peer pressure (voice in the back of my head "oooh but what if anyone ever looks at those files?? What'll they think???" type nonsense).
I also had a few files that came in much higher resolution that I re-encoded to fractions of their file sizes and honestly same effect.
Shhh – the ISPs need a reason to sell bigger data plans. Please think of the ISPs…
Me getting 480p videos for my video projector : "Oh... no really?" ¯\(ツ)/¯
PS: FWIW I do have a Vision Pro (for work, I didn't pay for it personally) so I technically could enjoy high res content... but honestly I can't bother using this to watch videos. I'm fine with just my desktop screen or video projector. I just don't get the high res.
This discussion drives me crazy because it’s the EXACT SAME FUCKING discussion that happened when 1080p screens became available in the 00s. So many people argued “oh it depends how far away you sit but you don’t really notice it” and “oh if the screen size is small your eyes can’t tell”
NO monthafucka if you have halfway decent eyesight there’s NO WAY you won’t notice a huge change in quality from 720p to 1080p even on a 6” screen. 1080 to 4k is noticeable on almost ANY size screen (we all just skip 1440p, don’t we?) and as the size of the screen goes up and up, it just gets more and more noticeable.
Edit: Forgot to mention, a big reason I heard people making this argument so much in the ‘00s is because I was in TV and computer sales.
I don't remember that discussion at all... I remember people being super excited for 1080p, but annoyed that there was no content for it because DVDs were still 480p and TV content was similar. Blurays were 1080p, but weren't really a thing until the late 00s.
We've had 4k for a decade, and there's still not much content for it. When there is, the difference w/ 1080p isn't so significant as to be worth the cost, as it's usually just upscaled 1080 content. 4k makes a lot of sense for a monitor that's 30" or larger, but for a TV where you're 10-15 feet away it doesn't make nearly as much sense.
And I'm sure most of those people were comparing VHS tapes or regular analog cable TV, or hooking up their DVD player with composite.
Diminishing returns.
480 to 720 was massive, and 720 to 1080 was big too. 1080 to 4K is definitely not always noticeable and 8K is well beyond worth the file size.
Study Boldly Claims 4K And 8K TVs Aren't Much Better Than HD To Your Eyes, But Is It True?
The rare exception to Betteridge's Law.
But yeah, this matches my experience. I can tell the difference between 1080 and 4k from my couch if I work at it, but not enough to impact my enjoyment of what I'm watching, and definitely not as much as the difference HDR makes.
Even at computer monitor distance, running a 4k monitor at 1440 with high pixel density is probably going to be a better experience than wrenching every single pixel you can get out of it. Framerate is better than resolution for gaming, for the most part.
The difference between 1080p and 2160p is night and day to me.
HDR 1080p is what most people can live with.
Isn't it just a limitation of human vision? No matter how much resolution we can create, the human eye will only ever see a certain level of resolution ... anything beyond that is imperceptible to us. I think I remember reading that 4K is the maximum we can realistically appreciate and anything beyond that is impractical because no one would ever notice the difference.
The only way higher resolutions work is if you start blowing up the size of the image itself. A 20" wide image at 720p looks good but the same image blow up to 60" becomes noticeably pixelated. A 20" wide image at 8K looks sharp and blown up to 60", it still looks sharp.
This is why I still use 768p as my preferred resolution, despite having displays that can go much higher. I hate that all TVs now are trying to go as big as possible, when it's just artificially inflating the price for no real benefit. I also hate that modern displays aren't as dynamic as what CRTs were. CRTs can handle pretty much any resolution you throw at them but modern TVs and monitors freak out if you don't use an exact resolution, causing them to either have input lag because the display has to upscale the image or a potential performance hit if the display forces the connected device to handle the upscaling.
8k is a little high. I feel like 4k is a significant change from 1080p, especially if you use your screen as a computer monitor.
